Land in the Tahr desert has gone from virtually worthless to valuable overnight

“I’m going to open up my own hotel,” says Vijay Singh, a man who has just become $60,000 richer after selling some of his farmland; land that is barren desert.

India’s thirst for solar energy has transformed Mr Singh’s property from a dry, dusty inhospitable environment into a sun-drenched power socket that promises much, both for energy companies and for a country that still suffers black-outs.

The Tahr desert spreads 200,000 square kilometres across North West India, and as Dr PC Pande from Rajasthan’s Central Arid Zone Research Institute points out, sun is not in short supply.

“Here in this region we have plenty of solar radiation,” he boasts. “It’s full of sun. Three hundred plus days of sun a year, nine hours a day.”

They will need it.

The government recently launched its National Solar Mission – a $19bn plan to generate 20,000 megawatt of solar electricity by 2022.

At the moment solar power contributes a tiny fraction of that – less than 1% – to the national grid.

An abundance of land

But it is not just the sunshine that is attracting government and private investors to Rajasthan.

The area is also abundant in something else that big power projects need – namely land.

“In this area, there’s a lot of government land available, and a lot of private land also,” says Multan Parihar from real estate agents Raj Landscape.

He has found Rajasthan a very good place to deal in real estate recently.

In the past six months, land prices in parts of the Tahr desert have tripled.

“People don’t do much agriculture here, it’s a waste land. But it can be used for solar power.”

The region’s solar revolution is expected to get underway shortly when one of India’s biggest energy companies – Reliance Industries – switches on its 5 megawatt solar plant in the nearby town of Khimsar.

Soaring energy demands

For the nation’s business leaders, energy projects are a high priority if India’s strong economic growth is to be continued.

“Manufacturing is directly related to energy,” stresses Hari Bhartia, one of India’s most successful industrialists, with an empire spreading across pharmaceuticals, energy and retail.

“I don’t think you can build a manufacturing industry unless you have a stable energy supply. Energy is part of economic growth.”

So, as someone who operates oil and gas fields in India, will Mr Bhartia be investing in some desert?

“No,” he says.

“Today these solar projects are mainly driven through government subsidy. In the longer term these technologies need to become self sufficient”

Despite the caution of some, Mr Singh is confident a bustling city will emerge from the scrub land he once owned, and a steady stream of solar technicians will come to stay in his hotel.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10767039

A SET of solar panels has been bought to help save CO2 at a school.

A SET of solar panels has been bought to help save CO2 at a school.

King Alfred School in Highbridge held a special ceremony to mark the arrival of the new green technology.

Burnham's mayor and mayoress, Derick and Christine Cooper, were the guests of honour at the event.

Burnham’s mayor and mayoress, Derick and Christine Cooper, were the guests of honour at the event.

The 20 panels were bought thanks to a grant from the Low Carbon Trust and a donation from Somerset County Council.

Students from the science and engineering club had been looking at renewable energy and gave a presentation on why the school chose solar energy.

http://www.thewestonmercury.co.uk/content/twm/news/story.aspx?brand=Westonmercury&category=news&tBrand=westonmercury&tCategory=znews&itemid=WeED09%20Dec%202009%2016%3A51%3A35%3A237

The fibre directs light to a nano-material where energy is produced

Solar power could be produced cheaply in specially designed optical fibres, say researchers.

The work, published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, makes use of nanometre-scale wires built around optical fibres like bristles.

Those wires give the light much more surface area to interact with, leading to higher overall efficiencies.

However, only the ends of the fibres must be exposed – they funnel the light elsewhere for power generation.

Instead of roof-sized panels, small collectors could be used on the roof, with the real machinery of solar power generation tucked away, for example, between a home’s walls.

“Using this technology, we can make photovoltaic generators that are foldable, concealed and mobile,” said Zhong Lin Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US.

Dye job

The most efficient – and the most familiar – solar cells are those based on silicon, which absorbs light, generates electrons, and shuttles them around to create a current.

Recent years have seen leaps and bounds in the use of so-called dye-sensitised solar cells, in which the electrons are released from special dye molecules designed to absorb sunlight.

While dye-sensitised cells are promising because they make use of cheap and robust materials, they are comparatively inefficient.

The new method starts with commercial optical fibre, like that used in telecommunications, with the outer layer stripped off.

The team then creates a “forest” of zinc oxide nanowires around the fibre, and deposits the dye molecules over them. This creates a much larger effective surface area that helps to boost the cells’ efficiency.

What is more, the light needs enter only at the ends of the fibres, so a large-scale implementation could see just small collectors on a roof, with the bulk of the power-generating materials tucked away.

“Optical fibre could conduct sunlight into a building’s walls where the nanostructures would convert it to electricity. This is truly a three-dimensional solar cell,” Professor Wang said.

Professor Wang said that future modifications to the surfaces of the nanowires could boost the devices’ efficiency.

“It’s really nice, elegant work,” said Saif Haque, a solar cell researcher from Imperial College London.

“It’s a clever way to make better use of the light.”

Story from BBC NEWS:

© BBC MMIX

The lights could go out when coal and nuclear power stations are phased out

The government’s new energy adviser says the UK could face blackouts by 2016 because green energy is not coming on stream fast enough.

Ministers have previously denied that the UK is heading for an energy gap.

But David MacKay, who takes up his post at the Department of Energy on 1 October, says that the public keep objecting to energy projects.

This, he says, is creating a huge problem, which could turn out the lights.

Professor MacKay is a researcher at Cambridge University.

His recent book, Sustainable Energy – Without The Hot Air, won applause for its examination of current government plans to keep the lights on whilst also cutting carbon emissions.

It concluded that policy is moving in the right direction, but the sums on energy provision simply do not add up – not enough power capacity is being built.

Speaking unofficially, he told BBC News that this meant that Britain could face blackouts in 2016 – when coal and nuclear stations are phased out.

“There is a worry that in 2016 there might not be enough electricity. My guess is that what the market might do is fix that problem by making more gas power stations, which isn’t the direction we want to be going in,” he said.

“So we really should be upping the build rate of the alternatives as soon as possible.”

Professor MacKay blamed the public for opposing wind farms, nuclear power, and energy imports, whilst demanding an unchanged lifestyle.

You cannot oppose them all, he said, and hope to have a viable policy on energy and climate change.

“We’ve got to stop saying no to these things and understand that we do have a serious building project on our hands,” he said.

Professor MacKay said he looked forward to engaging the public in a more open debate about what he calls the realities of energy policy when he takes up his post.

His says his new masters in Department of Energy and Climate Change have impressive commitment to solve the issues.

Professor MacKay’s many supporters will hope that he is allowed to continue speaking openly to the public after he takes office.

Story from BBC NEWS:

© BBC MMIX

Walmart is adding five more stores to its solar-energy pilot program – but not because management’s turned into a bunch of tree-hugging Arkansas hippies. The megastore multinational is going green for the sake of green – money, that is.

The five latest stores in Walmart’s pilot program, which now totals 20 stores, Sam’s Clubs, and distribution centers in Hawaii and California, will all be located in sunny Puerto Rico. Their solar installations will be provided by SunEdison, described by Walmart as being “North America’s largest solar energy services provider.”

Walmart, however, won’t be buying the solar systems from SunEdison. Instead, that panel punter will finance, own, build, and operate them itself, and sell the generated juice to Walmart. The systems will provide the stores with 25 to 35 per cent of their electrical needs, and are projected to produce 90 million kWh of power over the 15-year life of the project.

Walmart is dead serious about solar power, stating in their most recent Solar Power Fact Sheet that “our goal [is] 100 percent renewable energy.”

The company’s current 20 installations are expected to produce 16 to 18 million kWh this year – and there are more to come. This April, Walmart forged a deal with BP Solar to install panels on an additional 10 to 20 Walmart facilities in California by 2011, which the company says will generate between 8 and 16 million kWh annually.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s calculations, this expansion will prevent more than 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from mucking up the atmosphere each year.

Those are hefty numbers, but they’re a mere drop in the proverbial bucket compared to what Walmart might eventually achieve. Jason Mick over at DailyTech estimates that if Walmart were to solarize all of its facilities, the resulting installations would total 35 square miles of panels that would produce a cool three gigawatts of power.

However, while Walmart’s dedication to solar power may seem impressive, the EPA ranks them only 15th among the US’s top 25 green corporations.

At the top of that list is Intel, which buys offset credits equivalent to 1.3 billion kWh, or 46 per cent of its total power needs. Will Swope, Intel’s VP for corporate sustainability, told Scientific American that Intel shareholders support the offset-credit program. “Economics have shown,” he says, “that companies that maintain a more sustainable footprint have done better – even in economic meltdown – than those that don’t.”

Intel, by the way, is also spending a chunk of its cash reserves on green tech. At this Wednesday’s Technology Summit in San Francisco, Steve Eichenlaub of the company’s Intel Capital investment group announced investments in five “cleantech” companies.

Eichenlaub also described the group’s cleantech focus as “meant to embrace how Intel has appreciated how what we do from a technology, architecture, and solutions standpoint can have a major role in making the policy, the efforts of the industry, and enabling new business models to address issues such as global warming.”

Make no mistake, however – neither Walmart, Intel, nor any of the other companies in the top-25 list are moving to sustainable energy or investing in cleantech out of the goodness of their corporate hearts. They’re doing so either to save money – Walmart – or to make money – Intel.

Some of those green greenbacks will be realized immediately, and some down the road. Intel’s strategic cleantech investments, for example, are helping build an industry that will require massive IT investments – investments that will help fatten Intel’s bottom line.

Intel thus benefits doubly: on a pure cash basis when they buy into a company early and then sell their stake when its value rises, and on an indirect basis when its entire cleantech portfolio births an industry sector with a ravenous hunger for compute power.

Walmart’s benefits are more immediate. The company’s energy director, David Ozment, recently told USA Today that Walmart was already enjoying “moderate savings” in its pilot projects, paying less than or equal to market-rate prices for its solar juice.

And those savings are coming at a time when energy costs are depressed due to the Meltdown and other factors. When utility costs rise – as most observes believe they will – Walmart will be sitting pretty.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/01/walmart_solar_panels/